Karachi: Sabeen Mahmud, entrepreneur, campaigner and all-round agitator, was killed on April 24th, aged 40 in Karachi. She was shot at point-blank range by two men on a motorbike. The Pakistani Taliban denied all responsibility. The Inter-Services Intelligence promised all possible help to the police. Nawaz Sharif’s government ordered the police to find the perpetrators within three days. The police said they were busy ascertaining a motive.
Really, it wasn’t hard to spot one. Here in the midst of anarchic Karachi was a woman who was even more anarchic, crazy, noisy and in-your-face. She was at the heart of every disturbance, from supporting rank outsiders in the local elections to organising flash protests on social media, and spiced up every organisation she belonged to, which was any outfit committed to challenging discrimination or injustice.
With her short-cropped hair and black-rimmed glasses, she looked like a New York intellectual and felt like a post-modern hippie child. She’d give you a straight, cool stare, equally straight talk, an easy laugh, and a philosophy of absolute fearlessness. If you were afraid, she’d say, you’d get nothing done: especially not in army-ridden, intolerant Pakistan, where so much was never to be questioned or discussed, and certainly not by women.
The centre of all she did was in a comparatively shabby street in the posh Defence district, where people can come and discuss anything under the sun, no matter what their creed or disposition or label. Abuse and threats came often. She laughed them off. Other dissidents left Karachi, but she loved it too dearly to live anywhere else. Friends said she should put a security guard on the café door; she preferred to invite her enemies in. In 2007 she hosted a talk by an author who had uncovered army finances; ISI people were invited, and some came. On April 24th she had just held a meeting to “un-silence” Baluchistan, Pakistan’s most neglected and separatist province, where hundreds of activists and students had been abducted, probably killed. Lahore University had been warned off the subject. There would probably be “blowback”, she told a friend; “I just don’t know what that blowback entails.”
The authorities and jihad-makers were all most extremely sorry. Not half as sorry as the artists, poets and thinkers of Karachi, who suddenly found it hard to breathe.
